


Superglue and Duct Tape and Hope

by Arukou



Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Imprisonment, Insomnia, M/M, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Pre-Slash, nobody is okay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-09
Updated: 2018-06-09
Packaged: 2019-05-20 06:13:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14889159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arukou/pseuds/Arukou
Summary: When the phone finally rings, it's not Tony calling Steve for help. It's the other way around.





	Superglue and Duct Tape and Hope

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MusicalLuna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MusicalLuna/gifts).



> Inspired by [MusicalLuna's](https://musicalluna-draws.tumblr.com/) beautiful artwork for the 2016 Tiny Reverse Bang. This was written in 2016, so obviously it's ignoring most of what's come since.

Tony doesn’t get out much any more. Pepp has taken on more and more of SI, and so long as he stays on top of R&D production, she doesn’t need to bother him. And he does stay on top of it. Because he spends all his time in the makeshift workshop at the Avengers compound. He churns out design after design: Rhodey’s legs, clean energy generators, better and smaller BARF prototypes, small ridiculous things, huge impractical things. He lets his muse have free reign in a way he hasn’t managed since MIT.

Rhodey watches. Tony can feel it. When he passes by in a wheelchair or carefully ekes by on his prostheses, his eyes pierce through the glass and straight into Tony’s back. Doesn’t matter. He’s got Rhodey. They’re together like they’ve always been, guarding each other’s backs. Every once in a while they’re summoned to Washington so Ross can lord his power over them all.

“Do you know where Steve Rogers is?”

“No.”

“Are you aware that Clint Barton was spotted in Kosovo fighting pirates?”

“Hadn’t heard.”

“Are you kidding me, Stark? Don’t tell me your satellite network’s not watching.”

“It’s been busy rerouting signals for my new cell phone network. You want a prototype? StarkPhones. Gonna be the next big thing.”

Ross glares and puffs out like an angry skunk, and Tony and Rhodey are unmoved.

It doesn’t matter, though, because Tony still can’t sleep.

He lays in his bed at night and stares up at the ceiling and turns it round and round in his mind. What could he have said, done differently, to keep them all together? That was all he’d wanted. The Avengers united, under one roof, to have each other’s backs as well as the world’s.

God, how did he ever manage the lone-wolf act before? He can’t remember. Sure, he’d had Rhodey and Pepper, but he’d pretended he didn’t. He’d kept them at arm’s length, guarded his heart as closely as he dared. And now, now he wanders the compound of the hall waiting to hear Nat’s wry laughter, waiting to be hit with a rubber suction cup courtesy of Clint, waiting to see Steve leaning against a door frame watching them all, both with them and a little apart from them at the same time.

It always hurt Tony’s heart to see him like that, to see that even after four years of fighting together, Steve could never quite manage to let himself be part of the family. Team leader? Sure. Friendly and sometimes strangely fatherly presence? Great? But a true member of the family?

…No, maybe he’d been that too. Maybe just not with Tony. Maybe that’s why he’d left. Maybe it was only Tony who felt like he’d been torn to pieces without the rest of the Avengers at his side. Without Steve at his side.

There was a moment, three months ago, when Tony had been visiting to drop off a new round of equipment for everyone. He’d caught Steve standing alone at the observation window in a soft heather gray sweatshirt, staring out at the fingers of snow that still clung to the training grounds.

“Penny for your thoughts?”

“I heard pennies are pretty worthless these days,” Steve said, his mouth twisting as he glanced at Tony. “I think you could spare at least a dollar.”

“But my coffee money,” Tony protested, already grinning. “Seriously though, why are you up here all alone?”

“Oh I was just…” The starlight glinted in Steve’s eyes, cold and silvery, and Tony could only think how Steve should be in sunlight always, even though the world was always thrusting him into Tony’s world, into the shadows. “It’s not important,” Steve said after a moment. “I’ll be down in a minute.”

“You sure, Cap? If you need some you-time, I think the others will understand.”

“No. It’s the first time you’ve been by in months. I can, I’ll be down. I told you I’d miss you and I have.”

For just a moment, Tony had become aware of how close they were, close enough that he could feel Steve’s body heat against the chill of the training area. And then he’d remembered himself and who they were to each other and who he was to other people. And he’d pushed away with a nod and a loose, easy smile. Now he lays awake at night and wonders if it would’ve turned out any differently if he’d damned the consequences. Or if he’d talked to Pepp about it. Or done anything besides turn his back on Cap.

It’s on one of his many sleepless night, eyes aching and dry, that the cell phone finally rings.

Tony turns and stares at it, disbelieving. For a moment he wonders if he hasn’t fallen into an exhausted stupor and it’s only the trickery of a dream that’s made the little screen light up. But even if it is a dream, he wants to hear Steve’s voice, even just once. In his dreams, his nightmares, the glimpses he catches between long bouts of sleeplessness, Steve is always silent. So he fumbles for the little clam-phone that’s vibrating across his bedside table and snatches it up, flips it and holds it to his ear with a breathless emotion that lingers somewhere on the borders of fear and hope and rage.

“Steve?”

For a long moment, so long Tony’s lungs start to seize because he’s not breathing, damnit, there is only silence. And then a man speaks.

“Iron Man?”

Tony doesn’t know the voice at first. It’s not Steve’s. That’s for damn sure. But then an echo of a memory, a moment nearly lost to overwhelming range, pings recognition through Tony’s brain. “Barnes?”

There’s a sound on the other end, almost like a flinch. A little inhalation, pain. Tony feels ashamed. Angry, but still ashamed. “What are you doing with this phone? This is Steve’s phone.”

“Dropped it. He dropped it. When they took him. They took him. I don’t, they took him.”

Adrenaline floods Tony’s system, a light switch suddenly burning at 300 Watts. “Barnes, what’s going on?”

“Please help him. I know, I know I did things, and he did things, but he’s not me. He was trying to protect me. He’s a good man. The best man. You know that. I know you know. I saw, I saw in your eyes. Please help.”

“Where are you? Why isn’t T’Challa helping?”

“When they woke me up, we decided to go, to keep Wakanda from getting in trouble with the Accords. We’re hunting terrorists. Afghanistan. They were ready for us. For Steve. I think they’re Hydra.”

Barnes sounds broken, fragile. Tony can sympathize. He knows what it is to be trapped in Afghanistan. To feel alone and forgotten and helpless. And on the other side of a hundred sleepless nights, he knows his reaction to Barnes was…not his best.

“Can you give me coordinates. I can be there.”

“You’ll come?”

“I’ll come.”

* * *

Tony’s stomach churns as he breaks Mach II. This latest suit is his stealthiest. He’s acting against the Accords. Again. Ross can’t know. He’s already got Tony’s balls in a vise, and this would be enough to lock him in the Raft for the next hundred years, trial be damned.

His shielding keeps him off radar and his cloaking device, modeled and neatened from the Helicarrier’s original panels, ensures no one will see him coming.

He shouldn’t be planning what he’ll say to Steve after. He should be focusing on his attack plan, his infiltration measures. Barnes hissed everything he knew into the cell phone, and Tony knows he’s still going in mostly blind. Barnes and Steve are traveling just the two of them, Wilson and Barton, Maximoff and Romanov in the wind. 

All of them scattered. All of them weaker for it. Tony wants them back where he can protect them. He’d do anything. He’ll beg Steve. He’ll go into hiding with them. (Who’s he kidding? No, he won’t.) But he can dream. Life on the run, he’s done it before. For about forty-eight hours, but still. He daydreams, thinks about what it would be like to have Steve at his back again, making him a better man. Maybe this time they’d manage not to keep secrets. Maybe it could be different.

But then FRIDAY beeps in his ear, and he’s at the coordinates Barnes gave him. It looks terrifyingly like the same system of mountains and caves and god-forsaken lands that the Ten Rings held him in all those years ago. For just a moment, he tastes gunpowder, feels the billowing heat of the forge against his face, and then he sees the glint of Barnes’ arm.

T’Challa must’ve fixed it for him. As he circles down to Barnes’ location, he sees the fabrication is darker now, still shining and metallic, but finished in a deep gunmetal gray. The star on his shoulder is still there, but it’s white instead of red. A little touch of his past and his present.

“Thank you,” he says, looking off to the side. It seems like he can’t quite look at Tony’s face.

“Are you ready?”

Tony doesn’t question, doesn’t even ask if Barnes is sure it’s this cave system. There will be time enough later to talk, to apologize, to maybe even heal. For now, though, Steve needs their help.

Hydra soldiers equipped for one super soldier are hardly equipped for a super soldier and one of Tony’s armors. Especially when they can’t see him coming. He can only run stealth until he fires his weapons, but it gets him far closer than they’re prepared for. Tony’s not good with close-quarters—it’s not what the suit was made for—but Tony makes do. His anger and fear feeds him and he uses it to mow down Hydra soldiers one by one.

It’s a woefully quick battle. He can feel Barnes eyes on him, can see him watching through one of the side cameras, but he’s only got eyes for the holding cells now. He tries the doors one by one. Empty cell after empty cell.

Tony grows more frantic.

“Are you sure he was here?” he asks, but doesn’t wait for Barnes’ answer. If Steve’s not here, what was even the point? Break the Accords and rush out into enemy territory for what? To break his heart into even tinier pieces?

But the last cell is locked and then locked again. Tony doesn’t bother trying to finagle the keypad. He fires and fires and fires until the locks turn to molten slag and break away. Barnes is at the end of the hall, watching with a carefully blank face. Let him watch. Tony has more important things to do.

He rips the door away and peers inside. Steve is there, sitting on a steel bench, head bowed and his ankles chained, his face a deathly pallor. They wouldn’t have…surely they didn’t…but there was a kill order on Steve before, with Pierce…what if they…

Tony’s helmet retracts with a thought and he skids to his knees in front of Steve. Metal squeals on the concrete floors and a wall of cold slaps Tony in the face. It’s a freezer. His breath clouds out in front of his face, obscuring Steve, making him a white dream, and Tony bites back a scream.

At the squeal of the armor, Steve flutters, the barest shiver through his body. His shoulders are crusted with frost, his lips and nose and fingers blue, but somehow, a bare cloud of breath seeps through his lips.

“Steve? Steve! Come on, Steve!”

His eyelashes are crystallized shut, but Tony can see them fluttering beneath the thin skin. Somehow, even though Steve can’t seem to say a word, can’t open his eyes, one of his stiffly clawed hands works it’s way up Tony’s arm. His lips flutter, and flutter again, and then he sags.

“Steve! Steve, no!”

Tony breaks the chains of Steve’s shackles with the same rage he aimed at the locks, and then he lifts Steve into his arms and turns. Barnes is there, frozen at the door. “Cryo,” he whispers, his eyes somehow both wild and dead. “They were trying to…”

He doesn’t need to finish the sentence. Tony knows. Nat showed him the files afterward, the files no one had thought to show him before. He’d known the generalities, but not the specifics. Now he knows how Hydra treats its most elite, how it…Tony can’t bring himself to think it, not with Steve stiff in his arms, pale as death.

“We need to get him somewhere safe.”

Barnes nods, doesn’t speak. He goes into mission mode, crouching in front of Tony, escorting them out. He leads them through a maze, a rat warren. Under the raw sun, the frost and ice melt from Steve in seconds and suddenly Tony worries about shocking his system. How did SHIELD defrost him in the first place? Why didn’t Tony look more closely at those files when he had the chance?

But after a few more minutes of hurried, clumsy climbing through bare rock, Steve’s color starts to return. His eyes are still fluttering beneath his thin, thin eyelids, but he doesn’t wake, doesn’t speak. Ahead of him, Barnes moves like a shadow detached from its boulder. If it weren’t for the flash of his arm, Tony would never see him coming.

At last, what feels like an eternity later, they arrive at a well-hidden base camp. Steve’s helmet is there on a bedroll, like a dog waiting for the return of its master. Barnes knocks the helmet aside and rolls out the mat, turning huge eyes on Tony. Now, with his mission accomplished, he looks terribly afraid and lost.

Tony awkwardly kneels in the armor and eases Steve to the mat, jostling him rather more than he meant to. His heart is pounding in his throat as he sits back to look at Steve, still too pale, pulse fluttering weakly in his neck.

“Come on, Steve. You were in an iceberg for seventy years. A little freezer should be nothing.”

Unbelievably, Steve’s mouth twitches, the barest hint of a smirk. His eyelids flutter, but they don’t open. Instead he mutters, “‘m dreamin’ ‘m dead couldn’a…”

“Stevie? Stevie, please wake up.” Kneeling on the other side of Steve, Barnes looks hangdog, and Tony looks between them, suddenly and acutely feeling how unwanted he must be. He served his purpose. He helped rescue Steve. Now he should go.

Awkwardly, Tony climbs to his feet and turns to face the desert. It always struck him as strange how cold the caves were, how cold Afghanistan can be. Shouldn’t a country beaten by the sun be eternally hot, an oven scorching the bones of the earth? But just now, he’s shivering.

He bows his head, holds on, just for a moment, to the feeling of having been at Steve’s side again, of feeling like some sort of team, something bigger than himself, and then he moves to hit the helmet catches.

“Don’t tell me you’re gonna go just like that.”

Tony’s chest seizes tight and lurches to the right, and for a moment he fears that the arc reactor is malfunctioning before he remembers that he doesn’t have it anymore. No, now the only thing in his chest is his cracked heart.

“T…Tony, I’m sorry.”

Something heaves up in his stomach, angry and hot and he bites back on bile.

“Like that’s enough?”

He turns back to find Steve sitting up, shaky and pale, expression impossible to read. Barnes is supporting his shoulder, but his eyes remain hidden, his mouth thin. Just as quickly as it came, Tony’s anger burns out. Who’s the bully now?

“I know it’s not enough. And I still disagree with a lot, a lot of what you did, Tony. But…I’ve missed you, Tony.”

Steve looks…young. So damn young. He’s only thirty-one. Tony can remember thirty-one. Seven years before his entire life would be turned upside down. He remembers how arrogant he was, how sure that he was right in everything from relationships to weapons manufacturing to national policy.

“And…” Steve’s looking down now. It’s not right, how he swings from barely thirty years old to over a hundred years old in less than a second. “I want to go home,” he breathes, glancing up, his eyes so very tired. Tony wonders if he’s ever been that tired. “I want to see everyone again. Be the Avengers again.”

“Do you really think we can?” Tony asks, and he’s not sure if he means to be cynical or hopeful, but he thinks Steve sees both of them in him.

“I think we can try. You came after me, right? That’s got to mean something.”

It means so much. More than Tony can even begin to say. But Steve reaches out his hand, the tips of his nails still a little blue, and Tony can’t help but take it, shucking the gauntlet before he reaches out. It’s skin against skin, Steve so frighteningly cold still, but he’s smiling a soft boyish smile with his century-old eyes and somehow, it feels like a beginning.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [here](http://arukou-arukou.tumblr.com/post/148867071346/title-superglue-and-duct-tape-and-hope-wordcount).


End file.
